Quote of the Day (Evelyn Waugh, With a British Definition of ‘News’)

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.” —English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Scoop (1938)

Well, I guess in the United States, the closest equivalent is any media outlet owned by the Murdoch family.

Media Blowing Smoke About Papal White Smoke

“It is a familiar saying around the Vatican that ‘he who goes into a conclave a pope comes out a cardinal.’ It is considered bad form to openly promote a papal candidate, even worse to appear to be campaigning for the job. Traditionally, to be considered a front-runner is almost a guarantee of failure. Yet that has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabili—cardinals considered to be ‘popeable.’ The current lists are heavily dominated by Italians.

“No Americans are among the papabile. Modern popes generally have come from countries with little political or military power. If an American were elected, says [Jesuit priest and author Thomas] Reese, ‘people would think the election was fixed by Wall Street or the CIA.’”— Jeffery L. Sheler and Eleni Dimmler, “The Next Pope,” US News and World Report, May 11, 1998

As I’ve gotten older, I have increasingly delighted in coming across past analytical journalism to see how well they predict what will come to pass. For all the hours these scribes devoted to their beats, you’d be surprised how many flunk this basic test.

This US News and World Report article from a quarter-century ago is a good case in point. It took another seven years after its publication before Pope John Paul II died. In that time, he appointed several dozen cardinals. Just as important, several were of such an advanced age that they were no longer considered papabile by the end of his pontificate. Some were even too old even to vote by this time.

Few fields lend themselves less to such thumb-sucking exercises as papabili prognostication. Reporters look at the Roman Catholic Church, see an institution whose dogma has changed little, all things considered, over the centuries, and believe that they can scope out which cardinal will ascend the throne of St. Peter.

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been blowing smoke about the white smoke at the end of these conclaves for years. Somehow, though, it feels worse with the one that will start on May 7 to replace Pope Francis.

I chuckled when I read the line in the above quote about how the trail of unsuccessful front-runners “has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabile.” Precisely—the US News and World Report piece was doing just that!

My question: have Vatican insiders been compiling these to guide their personal selections for the next pope—or to amuse themselves as they take languid lunches with journalists desperate to please their bosses back home?

In many respects, I part company with the neoconservative author George Weigel and his brand of ultra-traditional Catholicism. He notes, for instance, that notwithstanding efforts by Francis to broaden Church governance, he was “the most autocratic pontiff in centuries.” Really? While Weigel might not be guilty of heresy, he certainly is of hyperbole—so much so that you couldn’t even get a devil’s advocate to argue his case convincingly.

Even so, I must agree with three points he makes in his Wall Street Journal analysis from a week ago about the upcoming conclave:

*“The cardinal-electors don't really know each other”;

*Popes, even with their appointment of many cardinals, can’t control the election of their successors;

* “Every conclave is a unique micro-environment, psychologically and spiritually.”

Considering these three points, why are so many people foolhardy enough to think they’ll know what will happen?

The speculation about the winner at the conclave has become ridiculous. A combined $17 million have changed hands on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, according to Alexander Osipovich’s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Complicating all of this even further is the misleading lens through which the media interprets the factions within the Church in general and the conclave in particular. Whatever divisions exist in the hierarchy—and they are real—they don’t neatly align with Democratic and Republican policies.

For all their orthodoxy on sexual issues, for instance, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were largely indistinguishable from Pope Francis on matters of war and peace and their deep skepticism of unrestrained capitalism.

So there is a strong possibility that whoever is selected at the end of this process will fulfill neither the greatest hopes nor worst fears of those watching the proceedings with burning interest.

I hope—no, I pray—that the cardinals conclude their deliberations swiftly. I just don’t think I can take much more of this ill-informed silly season.

Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

Quote of the Day (Dahlia Lithwick, on Covering Democracy Subversion Before the Next Election)

“If we learned anything from 2016 and 2020, it is that you can’t start covering democracy subversion two weeks before the election. It can’t be, ‘Oh, wait, now I’m starting to realize that they’re closing polling places in minority precincts’ or that people are planning to terrorize election workers with guns. All these democracy subversion questions are kind of invisible to us—they are structural, they are system-wide, they are not interesting. So we just keep erring on the side of covering battles between good guys and bad guys. This is a rich, nuanced conversation about efforts to both subvert the vote and then make the country itself a more fragile, authoritarian place. We are just very bad at covering systems and structures of democracy in the press. It is always going to be more interesting to cover a one-off case and do a breathless account of what happened in oral argument. But we need to be covering entire systems and structures. I don’t think we can tell it as a background story.”— Slate Senior Editor and Supreme Court expert Dahlia Lithwick, quoted by Kevin Lind, “Q&A: Dahlia Lithwick on the Colorado Case, The Election, and the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, Feb. 7, 2024

Keep this in mind as you watch or read about oral arguments, this week and (maybe) later, concerning Supreme Court rulings related to the 2024 election.

In their questioning of the different counsels, the justices, whether right or left, struck me as concerned with the precedents and punctilios of the law. They seemed blissfully unaware that the candidate at the heart of the Colorado case cared nothing at all about either, or indeed of anything other than seizing power to avoid legal peril for himself.

In either words, they wanted to find a past legal guide to a crisis of a kind and magnitude not previously seen in American history.

They fear a ruling that could take power away from the American electorate, even as they miss the larger point that the appellant in this case was trying to do precisely that in the last two Presidential elections.

They fear a ruling that could involve them in deciding a Presidential race, even though one justice (Thomas) was part of the court majority that decided the critical Florida count 24 years ago and even though several others (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were part of the effort to induce the court to come down in the GOP’s favor.

They fear the application of the Fourteenth Amendment in a realm not seen before, ignoring the clear language of this measure concerning those who foment an insurrection--even though they have long embraced the dubious notion that the amendment's reference to "persons" also applies to corporations.

It might help if the press starts reporting on the state-by-state battles going on right now that will determine if democracy will be subverted this fall. In the meantime, we might ask for a bit more skepticism as the justices practically beg to let this latest judicial c(o)up pass from their lips.

(For more on the Supreme Court justices' questions in the oral arguments on the application of the 14th Amendment in the Colorado primary cases, see Amy Howe's post yesterday on the SCOTUS Blog. It is a fine piece of its kind, but also, alas, illustrating Ms. Lithwick's point that "entire systems and structures" are not being covered by the press.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on a ‘Rotten Cabal’)

Roman Roy [played by Kieran Culkin]: “There's just something about betraying our father that just doesn't sit well with me.”

Kendall Roy [played by Jeremy Strong]: “He's a central player in a rotten cabal that has basically eaten the heart out of American democracy.”

Roman: “ ‘Rotten Cabal’ is a good name for a band.”— Succession, Season 3, Episode 2, "Mass In Time Of War," original air date Oct. 24, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

So now the fourth and final season of Succession is at hand. Once the series ends, fans like me will not only miss its backstabbings and other assorted plot twists, but also wisecracks like the one above from Roman, as well as the unusual verb forms used by its characters and so many others in the business world (from this same episode, Kendall’s “You aren't Judasing, are you, Greg?”)

The media family that inspired this acclaimed satire, the Murdochs, are finding it harder these days to, as Kendall (again) put it, “clean-slate this.”

This week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis not only expressed doubt that powerful patriarch Rupert Murdoch would have trouble traveling to testify in the trial arising from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, but also found that the evidence in the case “demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that Fox’s behavior constituted defamation per se.

The speed with which mendacity can ricochet around the world has grown exponentially, disrupting the media, politics, and even everyday life increasingly damaged by falsehoods about public health and climate change.

The law, despite its agonizingly slow pace and manifest shortcomings, may be the only institution in American life that can still hold accountable “the rotten cable” represented by the Murdochs’ News Corp. and the political grifters so long in league with it.

Quote of the Day (Alain de Botton, on ‘The Problem With Facts’)

“The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them but that we don’t know what to do with the ones we have.”— Swiss-born British author and philosopher Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual (2014)

Will the Fox ‘Twin Galahads’ Lay Down Their Trump Lances?

“Mr. [Seamus] Colonnity’s valiant colleague, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, was joining in Fox's defense of the president. So we had on our hands twin Galahads tilting lances. But Mr. Fartmartin's efforts to link Hillary Clinton to all of Mr. Trump's calamities weren’t quite getting traction. Still, one had to applaud the passion with which these two ‘Lions of Fox’ defended their president. If only more members of the media were as patriotic. Mr. Trump returned the favor by inviting them frequently to golf with him, and told me to comp them whenever they stayed at Trump properties. Naturally, the media even managed to make these friendly gestures by Mr. Trump seem criminal.”— American author and political satirist Christopher Buckley, Make Russia Great Again: A Novel (2020)

Among the many joys of Christopher Buckley’s fake memoir by "Herb Nutterman"—President Trump’s seventh chief of staff—are the hilarious names created for their very thinly disguised, real-life counterparts. (Do I really need to tell you that Colonnity is Sean Hannity and Fartmartin is Tucker Carlson?)

The difficult aspect of writing this satire, though, lay in spinning out a plot more absurd than what has been happening in the Age of Trump—very much including at the media outlet that helped propel him to the White House.

The irony in Buckley’s passage above extends well beyond those names for the Fox prime-time stars. As any fan of Lerner and Loewe (or, for that matter, T.H. White and Sir Thomas Malory) would remember, pure-hearted Sir Galahad was loyal to King Arthur, a wise, judicious monarch who ruled Camelot with wisdom.

But “Colonnity” and “Fartmartin” follow—for reasons best known to themselves and their boss, Rupert Murdoch—a President governed not by reason but by rampaging resentment.

Like Facebook, Fox News has fashioned a monster out of Frankenstein: an audience that has turned angrily on its creator. A quarter century after Murdoch gave free rein to Roger Ailes to whip viewers into a lather of bitterness over the liberal elite, the network’s prime-time pundits have not seriously tried to convince them that Donald Trump lost the election fairly and that no amount of challenges based on nonexistent evidence can reverse that outcome--even as many of their colleagues have admitted the obvious.

How dismally they must have felt over a week ago to hear crowds in Washington chant, “Fox sucks!”—all because the network finally attempted to live up to its “Fair and Balanced” moniker by calling Arizona for Joe Biden.

As my friend Joe Ferullo noted in a recent piece for The Hill, Fox is hardly alone as a channel that traded objectivity for editorializing—it is part of a larger trend towards “the tribal journalism of cable news,” mirrored on the left by MSNBC and CNN.

But, in the current needlessly fevered transition, Fox bears unique responsibility for the belief of 70% of Republican voters polled by Politico/Morning Consult that Joe Biden's victory was not "free and fair." Their evening stars—Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—have been particularly reckless in giving a forum for the Presidential voter fraud narrative.

All of this might be amusing, in its odd way, if Hannity and Carlson weren’t aware that Trump isn’t missing a few brain cells. But they are, and that knowledge opens them up to a charge of journalistic malpractice.

According to an article in Vanity Fair by CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter, Hannity has grown tired of the 24/7 burden of being on call as an off-camera sounding board and on-air booster of a President desperately needing attention. “Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates told Stelter.

But Hannity dares not say anything remotely like this publicly. Doing so would not merely end the friendship of the President with his “shadow chief of staff,” as Stelter suggests; it would also mean that progressives would remorselessly chide him for shameless cheerleading for the President, that the network would lose access to and patronage from a still-powerful figure in American politics, and that Hannity would open himself up to the same kind of retaliation experienced by two other media personalities formerly friendly with Trump, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

And so, Hannity tries to leave minimal daylight between himself and the President. "Americans will never be able to believe in the integrity and legitimacy of these [election] results," he told viewers as Joe Biden built an electoral and popular vote advantage that Trump did not enjoy in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. He has taken to retailing the President’s baseless charge that an electronic voting system used by election authorities across the United States has cost him millions of votes.

Carlson has had to perfect a similar balancing act of publicly embracing the President while privately stressing out over the President’s fecklessness. 

In early March, after backing Trump to the hilt during the impeachment fight, he felt compelled to fly down to the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago resort to tell the President that COVID-19 really WAS a big deal. That warning, the commentator said, was based on a tip from a non-partisan figure in the U.S. government with access to intelligence, who claimed that the Chinese authorities were concealing the severity about the outbreak (advice, it should be noted, that the President could have availed himself of if he paid attention to his daily intelligence briefing).

The President’s shift in tone after their talk was short-lived, as Trump went back to downplaying the seriousness of a pandemic that, as of this writing, has claimed more than 250,000 American lives.

Nevertheless, Carlson feels obliged to give oxygen to the conspiracy theories of this lazy, lying excuse for a manager. The broadcaster has claimed that the "outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters" and put in the hands of "clearly corrupted city bureaucrats."

The problem is that Trump keeps devising wilder and wilder tests of the loyalty of his Galahads. One would have thought that Carlson, for instance, would have gotten a lifetime pass from the President by inappropriately comparing critics who think Trump contracted COVID-19 through his own reckless behavior with those who say women in provocative clothing ask to be raped.

(In a blog post right after that statement, Wonkette properly gave Carlson's insanely offensive analogy the back of her hand: “There is, in fact, no known outfit in the world that is scientifically proven to prevent sexual assault. Masks, on the other hand, are known to reduce the transmission of COVID-10. We all know this. It's been proven.”)

But Trump’s multi-state electoral challenges—knocked down, one by one, across the country—may be too much for even Carlson to stomach.

First, Carlson was embarrassed into offering an on-air apology about ballots illegally “cast” by dead people when one cited case, James Blalock of Georgia, turned out to be correctly—and legally—cast by his widow, Mrs. James Blalock.

Second, after offering Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as much time as she wanted to exhibit her “evidence” of voter fraud, she angrily declined, leading to Carlson’s on-air explanation of the brush-off.

It’s one thing when Fox personalities elsewhere on the schedule are finding it increasingly difficult to hide their impatience over the endless and pointless electoral lawsuits. It’s another entirely when even the “twin Galahads” are showing signs of cracking under the strain.

Yet Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson may have no choice but to follow through, as long as they can, with their daily nighttime charade, even as the most brazen challenge to Presidential election results in American history continues unabated.

Like any major company, Fox fears a competitor that can slice into its market share. Trump has already called on his supporters to watch Newsmax and One America News Network, two rivals that have been out-foxing Fox as purveyors of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The “twin Galahads,” then, may represent Murdoch’s best chance of warding off trouble from a President whose candidacy he endlessly promoted four years ago, despite privately dismissing him as an“[expletive] idiot,” according to an April 2019 article in the Daily Beast.

(The accompanying photo of Sean Hannity was taken May 29, 2014, by Michael Vadon; the photo of Tucker Carlson, speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, FL, was taken Dec. 22, 2018, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

Quote of the Day (Fr. Andrew Greeley, on Bishops, Parish Priests, and the Media)

“Bishops are more important for the mass media and for those not of their denomination than they are for members of the denomination. The membership sees the parish clergyman on Sunday, and hence the bishop is not all that important a symbol to them. But the nonmembers and the media professionals don’t have a parish clergyman of that denomination, and so the bishops is ‘theirs’ in a sense that he is not to his own flock.” —Catholic sociologist, theologian, newspaper columnist, and novelist Fr. Andrew M. Greeley (1928-2013), "Church Leaders as Media Symbols," in A Piece of My Mind…on Just About Everything (1983)

Quote of the Day (Tyler Brule, on the Post-Shooting Suffering of the Vegas Massacre Survivors)

“With more than 500 people injured, Nevada's medical system is going to be overwhelmed for years to come by the need for specialised physio, psycho and occupational therapy treatment that demands doctors with battlefield experience rather than sports therapy training. Rather than waiting for the next attack, media outlets might commit to rolling coverage of what it’s like to live with the disfiguring injuries inflicted by such weaponry.”—Tyler Brule (himself hit by two bullets while covering the Afghanistan war), on the largest mass shooting (for now) in U.S. history, in “The Fast Lane: What It Feels Like to be Hit by a Bullet,” The Financial Times, Oct. 7-8, 2017

Quote of the Day (James Fallow, on Rupert Murdoch’s “Embattled” Career)

“Another constant in his [Rupert Murdoch’s] career is its embattled, roller-coaster quality. Murdoch is said to be popular and admired within his own organization, rather than resented, mocked, or gossiped about behind his back. But with business rivals he is always in feuds and showdowns, and not only high-profile ones like that with [Ted] Turner. He has taken big risks (one associate describes Murdoch's making, in a matter of minutes, the billion-dollar decision to back Fox News ‘the way you or I might order lunch’), and his business has suffered serious reverses. In 1990, in an episode vividly described by [William] Shawcross, Murdoch was nearly forced to liquidate News Corp after a bank in Pittsburgh refused to roll over a small but crucial portion of his corporate debt. Although admirers compare him to Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller because of his appreciation of technology and his instinct for strategic advantage, Murdoch is perhaps best compared to Bill Clinton: his nature keeps getting him into predicaments from which his talent lets him escape. “—James Fallows, “The Age of Murdoch,” The Atlantic, September 2003

His appearance before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch said mournfully, was “the most humble day of my life.” Many might think he had misspoken, meaning to say it was “the first humble day of my life.”

But James Fallows’ profile in The Atlantic runs directly in the face of those ready to begin writing Murdoch’s business obituary. I had long recalled this piece because of an odd little anecdote about the publisher's relationship with Bill Clinton: “Each has lunched at the other's office in New York, and Murdoch came away impressed by Clinton's ability to discuss impromptu almost any issue arising almost anywhere on earth. Associates of both say that despite the political differences between the men, they clicked because of complementary personalities: Murdoch loves to listen, and Clinton loves to talk.”

But in re-reading the piece, I realize that Fallows had overlooked another possible reason why these two men, in a weird way, bonded: their Houdini-like ability to escape damn near everything. That same ability should increase skepticism, even among the many who loathe him, of any notion that Murdoch’s number is, at long last, finally up. Remember, above all, the line from the late novelist Josephine Hart: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

(Full disclosure: two of my college friends were among the high-profile casualties after Murdoch began installing his own primarily British-based upper echelon after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. The carnage there was as immense as it was predictable.)

Take this latest scandal, for instance, about the Murdoch empire's all-too-cozy relationship with Scotland Yard, and in particular the phone hacking. It's not like he hasn't tried something sleazy like this before. For instance, not long after Murdoch’s buccaneering entrance on the American media scene, he had done something similarly loathsome: the infamous “SAM SLEEPS” photo, of “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz behind bars, was spread all over the front page of his recently acquired New York Post. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever adequately explained how the Post photographer got back the prison guard for that shot, nor why a grand jury never returned an indictment in the case.

Even if Murdoch slinks away, mortally wounded, from the media wars, he has already left his imprint on the way Americans receive and process news. Fallows guessed correctly, nearly eight years ago, the reaction against the Post, Fox News, and the other elements of Citizen Murdoch’s empire: “papers, radio shows, TV programs, and Web sites for liberals, and conservative ones for conservatives.”

In a way, Fallows noted, Murdoch was engineering a reversion in time: “Our journalistic culture may soon enough resemble that of early nineteenth-century America, in which party-owned newspapers presented selective versions of the truth. News addressed to a particular niche—not simply in its content but also in its politics—may be the natural match to an era with hundreds of satellite and cable channels and limitless numbers of Internet sites.”

In other words: no more dream of journalistic objectivity. One side has Fox, the other MSNBC; one side has the Wall Street Journal, the other The New York Times. Neither is remotely interested in what the other has to say--or, indeed, any other non-ideological view. I have my news and you have yours, buddy, and never the twain shall meet.